“I’ll bury her,” I said.
Far back off a narrow road the orphan-age sat, a crumbling red brick building that leaned against the rise of a hill. The long drive that approached it from the road was lined with ancient oaks and maples. More of the great trees scattered over the large unkempt yard, crowding the house itself, stretching their gaunt arms above the slate roof and giving me the uneasy feeling that they were holding the place mesmerized.
Three small kids in jeans and sweaters were playing listlessly under the trees in the front yard. In the rear, I saw a couple other kids coming down to the house from a barn farther up the slope.
I went up across a wide porch into a hall. The floor was almost black from innumerable applications of oily sweeping compound and had long ago begun to splinter away. I stopped inside the door for a minute, adjusting to the oppressive, heavy air. The institutional odor of the place, animal and antiseptic, surrounded me like an invisible fog. At the end of the hall there was a closed door with a small sign posted on the hall side. I went down and read the sign: MR. HENDERSON, SUPERINTENDENT. When I rapped on the door, a voice invited me to enter.
A man sat behind a desk in an early, interior dusk that was the room’s own. The light was too dim for me to distinguish his features until he stood up and came around the desk to meet me. Then I saw that he was old and stooped, with the skin drying on his bones. His grip was firm enough, however, and his voice was soft and resonant, without a quaver.
“Mr. Henderson? My name is Norman Grieg. I’ve come to talk with you about a girl who lived here a long time ago.”
“Sit down, Mr. Grieg. I’ve been here over a quarter of a century. Possibly I may remember her.”
He resumed his seat, lacing his bony fingers on the desk in front of him. The little light that entered the room behind him struck a highlight from his bald dome.
“Who is this girl, Mr. Grieg?”
“Margaret Hadley.”
“Oh, yes. Little Maggie Hadley. I remember her very well. Her name was not Hadley, of course, when we had her here. She took the name from the lady she went to live with. Her parents lived on a farm nearby. The mother died in childbirth. The father died later as the result of an accident while ploughing. Maggie was about two at the time and was placed in the care of this institution. She remained here ten, twelve years. I’ve forgotten exactly. A pretty child. Intelligent I wasn’t happy about placing her in the home of Mrs. Hadley, but unfortunately I’m not the final arbiter in those matters. Later, she went off on her own to college and made a good career for herself as a librarian. I used to receive infrequent letters from her. None now, I think, for all of two years. Are you a friend of Maggie’s?”
“We were engaged to be married,” I said. “She was assistant librarian at State University. I’m an instructor there.”
He stared for a long time at his laced fingers.
“You spoke in the past. Mr. Grieg.” he said. “I’m an old man and have become sensitive to the tense.”
“Margaret Hadley is dead. She died last night in her apartment near the University. She was strangled.”
He kept staring at his laced fingers. Outside the window behind him, the black branches of an oak were like other fingers scratching at the glass. The sound of them was a dry, rasping whisper in the room. The old man’s voice, when he spoke, was hardly louder.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “The thought of little Maggie... If I can be of any help...”
“I want to find the person who killed her. I know so little of her past, of the people she has known. I came here to see if you could suggest a line to follow.”
He stirred restlessly, the light slipping over the curve of his skull.
“I knew her as a child. What could there be in a girl’s childhood?”
“Who knows? If you would just talk. Just tell me what you remember.”
“There’s so little. A small child. A young girl. She did her chores around the place. She did her lessons and learned quickly. She got along well with the other children. She was brought here in the fall, I remember, because it was a terribly bad winter that year.”
“Who else was here then?”
“Who else?”
“What other children, I mean.”
“It’s so hard to recall. A long time ago. So many children came and went altogether. In the spring, I remember, Otto Bloom was placed in our charge. The spring after Maggie came. They grew up together, Otto and Maggie. Otto stayed on after Maggie left for Mrs. Hadley’s. No one, of course, was willing to take him in. He was permitted to leave on his own when he was eighteen. Several years after Maggie’s departure, that was.”
“Who was Otto Bloom? Why do you say no one was willing to take him in?”
He lifted his face, and I had a strange notion that his eyes had retreated suddenly into their sockets. Oak fingers fumbled at the window. Even outside, now, the shadows were deepening. The name of Otto Bloom was a whispered echo inside my skull. Somewhere, sometime, I had heard the name before. The old man stirred again and spoke.
“You are not a native of this section, Mr. Grieg. If you were, you would not need to ask those questions. Otto was the only son of Mona Bloom. The only child. He was the fruit of her fourth and last marriage. To the elder Otto Bloom, that is. Mr. Bloom was a wealthy farmer who lived not more than five or six miles from this place.”
“The name Bloom seems faintly familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“Mona Bloom was a murderess, Mr. Grieg. She killed Otto Bloom with a hatchet as he slept. Alone, in the middle of the night, she buried his body in an orchard below their house. When the body was found and an investigation started, it was learned that Mona Bloom had been married three times previously. In every case, to a man of some wealth. One had simply disappeared and was never heard from again. The other two had died suddenly, one by falling, somehow, on a pitchfork, the other by what was written off as a heart attack. Mona Bloom murdered them, of course. After her conviction for murdering Bloom she confessed the others. Boasted of them, indeed. She died on the gallows.”
“What kind of boy was Otto?”
“What kind would you expect? We tried to keep his mother’s story from him, but such things cannot be kept secret. Who knows what knowledge like that would do to the heart of a boy? He was gloomy, withdrawn. He brooded, but he was intelligent. Remarkably intelligent. He read omnivorously. When he left here at the age of eighteen, he had an education that would he a credit to any college graduate. I never heard from him. Where he went, what he did, I don’t know.”
I felt very strange. The tapping of the oak fingers at the window seemed suddenly very loud. As if they were tapping a message. A message my brain was on the verge of grasping.
“Tell me, Mr. Henderson. Is there anything in particular that you can remember about Otto Bloom? Other than what you’ve told me. Something that might mark him quite distinctly.”
The old man shook his head. He turned his chair suddenly, sharply, so that his profile was toward me. Against the fading light of the window, his naked head and wasted face were the silhouette of a brooding hawk.
“Nothing. I can recall nothing else.” He paused, as if he were listening intently to the faint voice of the past, and when he resumed speaking, his words were measured, dropping slowly and tiredly into the still, shadowed room. “Except that, for a boy who had little use for exercise, he was extremely strong. Much of his strength, I think, was in his hands. He had very large hands.”
I stood up, and the rooms was no longer still for I heard above the rustle at the window, filling this crumbling place with sudden terror, the spaced reverberations of crashing chords.